PEA Soup

We Need to be Better With Anonymous Refereeing

I've been doing a lot of refereeing for conferences, journals, prizes and such and a recent discussion with some of my co-referees leads me to want to post here about anonymous refereeing.  My main aim here will be to list some of the ways authors screw up in anonymizing papers and also to raise a question or two about trickier points of making a paper truly anonymous.  But I want to state out front that I think all refereed conferences should require that papers be anonymized when they are submitted. I know that in a small profession we will often have some idea who wrote papers, but I think we still ought to do the best we can within that constraint. (Continued below the fold.)

CFP: Political Utopia: Promise or Peril? (Bowling Green Workshop in Ethics and Public Policy, April 25th-26th, 2014)

I figure PEA soup readers will be interested in our new workshop topic! 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS 

The Bowling Green Workshop in Applied Ethics and Public Policy 

Political Utopia: Promise or Peril? 

April 25^th-26^th, 2014 

The Bowling Green Workshop in Applied Ethics and Public Policy will take place in Bowling Green, Ohio, April 25^th-26^th, 2014. The keynote speakers are David Estlund (Brown University) and Gerald Gaus (University of Arizona). 

Those interested in presenting a paper are invited to submit a 2-3 page abstract (double-spaced) by November 1, 2013. We welcome submissions in all areas in applied ethics and philosophical issues relevant to public policy. Special consideration will be given to papers relevant to this year’s conference theme: on the prospects of ideal and nonideal theory in contemporary political philosophy. The theme is to be construed broadly, so we encourage submissions that draw on normative ethics, metaethics and applied ethics. 

Only one submission per person is permitted. Abstracts will be evaluated by a program committee and decisions made in November 2013. Please direct all abstracts and queries to: [email protected] 

Further information about the Workshop and previous workshops are available on the workshop website (under construction): http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/phil/conferences/index.html

Thought now accepting submissions in Value Theory

The new journal Thought is now accepting submissions in Value Theory (broadly interpreted, to include all of ethical theory and metaethics). I am the new Subject Editor for Value Theory submissions, assisted by an expert panel of referees (which includes a large number of PEA Soup contributors).

The aim of the journal is to publish short (<4500 words) original papers in philosophy. A description of the journal’s refereeing process can be found here. We aim to have a quick review time, with a commitment to giving authors a response within 8 weeks.

Philosophical Trajectories Official Launch

I am pleased to announce the official launch of Philosophical Trajectories, a data-collection project dedicated to helping philosophers learn from each other's publishing experiences. Many thanks to those of you who helped with the beta testing. I encourage everyone to participate; the more data we collect, the more useful the site will become. If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please don't hesitate to email me.

The ethics of professional (non-)correspondence

I communcate with lots of academics regularly, as I'm sure most readers of this blog do. This is not surprising. But what I do find surprising is how frequently academics simply do not respond to, or even acknowledge, communications from professional colleagues. This includes communications of the following sorts: invitations to give a talk, invitations to contribute a paper, invitations to review a paper, messages sharing a copy of published work that engages their views, messages sharing in-progress work that engages their views, and messages asking specific questions about their own published work. (The list is not exhaustive.)

New Project Beta Test

I am starting a new project to help philosophers share and learn from each other's publishing experiences. The project combines some of the goals of my (essentially defunct) Venue Poll project with ideas I got from using Andrew Cullison's fantastic Journal Surveys site. The project is currently in beta, and I'm asking people to check out the site, play with the survey, and provide feedback. All data collected during the beta is for testing purposes and will be deleted when the site officially goes live, at which point I encourage people to return and take the survey for real. In addition to looking for general feedback, I ask about a specific issue below the fold. 

Philosophical Trajectories [http://personal.bgsu.edu/~faracid/pt.html]

Self-plagiarism in academic publishing?

I've recently reviewed manuscripts for two interdisciplinary journals, journals in which philosophers can and do publish but in which articles by philosophers would be in the minority. I later surmised that the manuscripts I reviewed were not written by philosophers. Both had features that struck me as being unorthodox. Most notably, both manuscripts contained many references to the authors' extant published work. They also included long (200 word+) quotations from the authors' previously published work, flagged such (e.g., "As I remarked in my (2005)...")

So far as I know, this sort of self-plagiarism would be unusual in a philosophy manuscript. Anonymous references in a philosophy manuscript are common (though one objection to them is that they essentially blow the cover on blind review), and it would not be strange to have many such references if the manuscript were part of a symposium, etc., where the author might say things like, "In response to this criticism about X, let us revisit my article on X." But I found this strong reliance on the author's previous work off putting and unprofessional. It seems faintly like a fallacious appeal to authority, for one. What if the position, arguments, etc., of the published work being self-plagiarized weren't convincing in the first place? And if all the arguments were made elsewhere, why should the manuscript I'm reviewing be published? 

Lastly, it looks like a way to pad your CV: republish, with small modifications,what you already published. This seems unfair to those authors who have actual new ideas to contribute.

Yet I'm also willing to concede that my reaction may reflect norms about originality, authorship, etc. specific to philosophy. So I'd be curious to know if others have reviewed manuscripts with these features; if the practices I've described are common outside philosophy; and if self-plagiarism (taken to this degree at least) is unprofessional. 

A New Blog: The Venue Poll

Thanks to everyone who offered feedback on my new blog ideas. After considering the comments, I have decided to forge ahead with one of the projects: The Venue Poll. This will be a blog dedicated to helping Philosophers get feedback on the best potential venues for their work. The blog is now live, though publication of abstracts will be delayed a week or two to make time for ironing out any kinks and getting a stockpile of abstracts from people. If you are interested in submitting, commenting, offering further feedback on the blog's format, or just seeing what this is all about, please head over to:

http://thevenuepoll.blogspot.com

I hope others will be as excited about this project as I am.

Feedback on Two (Potential) New Blogs

I'm thinking of starting two new blogs. Rather than just jumping in and creating them, I thought I would turn to the folks here at PEA Soup to get some feedback. I am interested, first, in feedback on whether these blogs are good ideas. This includes both the question of whether there are independent reasons to (not) have such blogs as well as the question of whether people would actually read and/or contribute to these blogs (i.e., whether I would be wasting my time creating them). Assuming one or both of these blogs is a good idea, I'm also looking for more specific feedback concerning how they should be set up.

Character Project Summer Seminar: “Character: New Perspectives and Empirical Discoveries”

June 17-29, 2013 - Wake Forest University

Seminar Leader: Christian Miller
Director, The Character Project

The goal of this seminar is to consider the existence and nature of character and virtue in light of various results in psychology. Participants will receive a stipend of $1,500 for attending, plus have their travel, meal, reading materials, and lodging costs covered. We expect to have several leading philosophers working in this area visit the seminar to each lead one meeting. The seminar meetings will conclude on Thursday, June 27, so that all participants can attend the Character Project final conference on June 27-29.

The application deadline is December 15, 2012. For more details please visit: http://www.thecharacterproject.com/summer.php